A short summer sabbatical has been in the works ever since my wife and I took a month off 5 years ago (when we were 30 years old). The experience was very valuable and formative for both of us, so we decided to do it again. This summer we are each taking a month off to rest. My wife just finished her 4 weeks off (she writes about her experience of taking a Sabbatical as a mother of two young children on our personal blog), and I’ve just started mine.
One activity that is restful for me is reading. My 4 weeks off will be filled with extra sleep (read: naps), reflection, writing, and lots of reading (oh, and I also plan to play some Pokemon Go).
One of the areas that I want to spend extra time reading and reflecting on is how a business owner can live out their calling in their business. So the last few months I’ve been researching books to read to help me deepen my understanding in this topic. As I read I am also writing my thoughts on this subject with plans to turn it into a short book.
Of over 40 books I’ve researched, here are the 11 books I’ve added to my summer sabbatical reading list:
The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
The Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillibeau
Rising Strong by Brene Brown
Do More Great Work by Michael Bungay Stanier
Courage and Calling by Gordon T. Smith
The Art of Work by Jeff Goins
Start with Why by Simon Sinek
Living Forward by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy
The Crossroads of Should and Must by Elle Luna
The Call by Os Guinness
You might think that all that reading and writing sounds like a lot of work and not very restful. But for me, both reading and writing are refreshing and inspiring activities. I love learning about new ideas and strategies and thinking about how to implement them practically in business and life. While my reading list seems quite long, my plan is not to read every book word for word but to read the ones that resonate with me and browse through the ones that are not as relevant. But after 3 days of my sabbatical I’ve already read through 2 books (I’ve also taken 2 naps).
What’s on your summer reading list?
[By the way, all the links above are affiliate links to Amazon. That means that if you click on one of the links and purchase anything on Amazon.com, they will pay me a small commission (between 4-6% of the sale). To read more about how this works, read my blog post “3 Ways to Make Money Blogging“.]